Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following readers on the theme: BreakApril 12 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5. Break: an interruption in continuity; a second chance. These seven authors will BREAK through what we think we know about this topic. Join us! And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter announcing upcoming readings each month. (We never share your email with anyone!)

Shannon Cain

Shannon Cain’s debut short story collection, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, is the recipient of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her stories have been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the O. Henry Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. They have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, The Colorado Review, the New England Review, American Short Fiction, Mid-American Review, and Southwords: New Writing from Ireland. She is the co-editor, with Lisa Bowden, of Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq (Kore Press, 2008) and co-adapter of Coming In Hot, the stage adaptation of the book. She is the Artist-in-Residence for the City of Tucson’s Ward One and the fiction editor for Kore Press. Her current creative project is Tucson, the Novel: An Experiment in Literature and Civil Discourse.

Stan Goldberg

Stan Goldberg is the author of Lessons for the Living: Stories of Forgiveness,Gratitude, and Courage at the End of Life, which received six national and international awards and was translated into Chinese, Indonesian, and Portuguese. He has published seven books, written numerous articles, and delivered more than 100 lectures and workshops throughout the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Asia on topics ranging from change, to flyfishing, to end of life issues. He is Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University, and devotee of the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) and Native American Flute. In 2009 he was named Volunteer of the Year by the Hospice Volunteer Association.

Leo Litwalk

Leo Litwak’s novel Waiting for the News received the National Jewish Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. He has published two novels and two works of nonfiction. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Look Magazine, and Best American Short Stories. He is a recipient of John Simon Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and first prize in the 1990 O. Henry Prize Stories collection. Professor at San Francisco State University for more than thirty years, he lives in San Francisco.

Meredith Maran

Meredith Maran is a book critic, award-winning journalist, and the author of several bestselling nonfiction books including My Lie, Class Dismissed, and What It’s Like to Live Now. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she reviews books for People, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe, and writes for a number of magazines. Since publishing a poem at age six in Highlights for Kids, she’s dreamed of publishing her first novel. A Theory of Small Earthquakes is it.

Sommer Schafer

Sommer Schafer is a candidate in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. She lives in San Rafael and is currently working on two collections of stories: My Father’s Memoirs, about a family coming to terms with a father’s mental illness and subsequent death, and Hope, about the citizens of a small town in Alaska. You can read her first publication, “The Table,” forthcoming later this year in Barge Journal.

Linda Gray Sexton

Linda Gray Sextonhas published several widely acclaimed novels as well as two memoirs about her life and relationship with her mother, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton. Her first memoir, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back To My Mother, was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. Her recent memoir, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide, is about her struggle with her own mental illness and the legacy of suicide left to her by her mother, who took her own life when Sexton was twenty-one. Unlike her mother’s story though, hers is a story of triumph. She lives in Northern California.

Mary Paynter Sherwin

Mary Paynter Sherwin’s work has appeared most recently in The Midway Journal, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, and Unswept. She was also recently named one of the Northwest’s most innovative poets by Rattapallax. Mary is pursuing an MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California and lives in Oakland with her husband, David.